New E-Peen(tm) Length System

Previously, everyone’s E-Peen(tm) length was relative to the leader. What this meant was that there was one user with a 13″ peen, and everyone else’s scores would be scaled against it. It was good on paper, but people hated it. There were multiple discussions about how bad it was, so yesterday I changed it.

In the new system, each E-Peen(tm) you earned contributes to a potentially unlimited length. It will never go down.

Unfortunately, people hated the scale of the new system. It meant their 8″ peens went down to 3″. This was to be expected, but after a few suggestions I changed it so that everyone starts with a minimum length of 3″, and then people were pretty happy!

I went to bed, then woke up and realized the rollover code still had the old calculation, and everyone had 3″ chopped off again. I just fixed it.

So yes, going forward: Your E-Peen(tm) has no limit to its potential length. It will never shrink, only grow.

You know, I do like the new system a lot (a *LOT*) more than the old system, and even more so than the original "counting" system.

The only remaining problem I’ve got is with the way e-peens seem to be "length"’d. Now you’ve got one more thing to work on balancing! I’ve worked my ass off for peens in this game so far, and so far I only ended up with a 3" peen yesterday. Streak peen, medal peen, unique peens, and I barely got anything to show for it.

I’d think the mad-ridiculous 20" peens would come for the tiny handful of people (like PDB and Fran) that’ve done everyfuckingthing, and the average would be 10"-13" for completing Ep. 1 and Ep. 2, fully streaked all forums, basically done everything that "can be done". Then the unique peens would be added to that, so on and so forth.

Also, to get your first 3", just set the class-specific peens at 3", you don’t have to set the code to actually say "3 inches" to start with. You know, Order of the Brown Starfish or Late Yak Sectarian. Then you don’t need to worry about hackish code setting lengths weird. ;)

I think something needs to be done to keep things a little inline with a statement I saw somewhere about the first six inches of e-peen being easy, and being harder to get after that.

There needs to be some kind of scaling, where the base length from each e-peen you earn contributes more the further the length is below 6", and contributes more the higher it is above 6". Ridiculous peens would still be possible, but there’d be a bit of a tapering-off point.

Also, I don’t know if different peens are contributing different amounts at this point, but I think that while the easy-to-get peens need to be worth a noticeable amount, hard-to-achieve or extremely unique peens need to contribute a lot.. while maybe some you-had-to-have-been-there peens need to contribute much less, so while having been around for a while gets you ahead of everyone else, a newcomer that actually pulls off some hard things could manage to get somewhere.

Honestly, I don’t know enough (err, care enough) about the e-peen system to comment on the dynamics of the changes, (other than I generally like them) but I do have to give you major props for acknowledging and doing something proactive about a system that many of your players dislike. That’s become quite the rare thing in the business world these days.